Wikipedia:Administrator Activity Proposal

Introduction

There are currently 326 sysops on Wikipedia. Of those, at about 09:00 UTC on 5 October 2004:

• 226 were last active in 2004-10
  • 87 on 05
  • 86 on 04
  • 27 on 03
  • 19 on 02
  • 14 on 01
• 66 were last active in 2004-09 (3 bureaucrats, 3 developers)
• 8 were last active in 2004-08
• 4 were last active in 2004-07 (one a bureaucrat)
• 2 were last active in 2004-06
• 1 was last active in 2004-05
• 2 were last active in 2004-03 (one a bureaucrat)
• 2 were last active in 2004-01
• 3 were last active in 2003-(10-12)
• 1 was last active in 2003-06
• 4 were last active in 2003-04 (may be a conversion artifact)

"Last active" means last used their account in a way which set its "touched" flag.

Objective

Many in the community believe that having inactive administrators is not good but not everybody; see the Rationale section below for details. As such, this proposal is put forward as a means to ensure that sysops will stay active.

• The sysops affected by the three month part of the policy are identified below. Please indicate which of them you believe this policy would cause to stay active. Jamesday 19:34, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Existing policy

There has been a policy that admin accounts are "de-admined" after six months' inactivity with the understanding that adminship will once again be granted upon request of the account holder. This policy was formulated specifically to address the possible security problem posed by stolen passwords.

However, this policy has not been followed consistently, perhaps in part because the software only permits "stewards" to "de-admin" someone, and "stewards" are few in number.

Rationale

Please feel free to edit this section if you come up with any more reasons. Some of the reasons cited for not having inactive admins are as follows:

• If a user wants to contact an admin, Special:Listadmins becomes useless if it's full of admins who are inactive. This is a real problem, not a hypothetical one.
  • Of those active at 09:00 on 5 October, 208 had visited on the 5th, 4th or 3rd. If you want a response within that time, the failure rate for a message left at the start of the 3rd, 57 hours ago, would be about 36%. Removing the sysops last active in June and earlier would reduce that to 32%, a minimal difference. If you accept a week as an acceptable time, 251 had been active on 9-28 or more recently, giving a failure rate of 23%. Approaches which are likely to be more effective than this one include:
    • Sorting Special:Listadmins by time of last activity, an easy programming change to make which places the most recently active admins at the top of the list (note that this need not be strictly ordered so that every single admin is ordered by the minute and second of the timestamp of the last edit; instead, it could be grouped by time category, as in "edited in last month", "edited two months ago", etc.). In addition, put a notice at the top of the page explaining that the list is ordered by period of last activity and explaining to newbies that they should probably contact admins near the top in order to increase the probability of receiving a rapid reply. This still leave an element of chance, which can be addressed by...
    • Providing a contact a sysop feature, with a way to say that you have accepted responsibility for replying.
• It gives misleading statistics when people report that we have 300 admins.
  • If all admins who were last active in June or earlier were removed the count would be 311. A cut off of about 33 days would be required to go below 300. This proposal would not reduce the count to below 300.
• People who have been away for a long period of time are not going to be aware of the policies. There is nothing wrong with saying they should be around for a month or more before reapplying for adminship. This period of reacquainting themselves with the new rules will prevent issues occurring from them breaking those rules.
  • This sounds like an excellent reason for providing a refresher reading list to admins who return, before routinely and automatically restoring their capability.
• Some feel we currently have too many admins, and are probably overly opposing in their RfA votes because of this. Removing the inactive people would give a better idea of how many admins we really have.
  • 4.2% of admins would be removed if the three month involuntary part of this proposal was fully accepted, none of the eligible candidates responded and all away notices were ignored. Have you ever rejected an otherwise qualified applicant because there were 4% too many admins? 1.5% won't be immediately restored to sysop capability on request, the rest left some sort of away indication somewhere (and maybe others I don't know about). The data provided earlier says how many admins we have who have been active within speicified time periods.
• Admins are supposed to be trusted by the community. People no longer involved with the project are not even known by the community, much less trusted by them.
  • These are the admins last active more than 3 months ago: User:Zoe, User:Khendon *, User:Jake Nelson *, User:Vicki Rosenzweig *, User:LittleDan. Six or more months: User:Optim (also a bureaucrat) *, User:Vancouverguy *, User:Salsa Shark, User:Mirwin, User:Efghij, User:Someone else, User:Notheruser, *, User:WojPob, User:LC. * indicates known to have given an away notice of some sort. How many of these are not trustworthy, based on either a look at their contributions and/ or memory of their conduct? Is it useful to cause the community to take the time to reconsider these as fresh candidates? Looking at their contributions, would you reject any of them?
• Keeping every admin even after they are inactive gives the impression that adminship is something so special it can never be removed.
  • At present two admins have been inactive for one year or more, none shown as having been absent for more than 18 months.

Some of the reasons cited for having inactive admins are as follows:

• It can currently be difficult to find a user with admin functions. Reducing the numbers of such users will make it even more difficult. Inactive users are generally contactable by email.
• If a user wants to contact an admin, Special:Listadmins becomes useless if it's full of admins who are inactive. This is a real problem, not a hypothetical one and will not be solved by this proposal since admins may be inactive not because they have left the wiki but rather because they are in a different timezone or are otherwise occupied at the time they are needed. A far better solution to this problem would be the institution of an online administrator page on which admin users could update when they came online and went offline.
• Some feel we currently have too few admins. Removing the inactive people would reduce the number even more, since inactive people can still be contacted by email. We need more admins (ie trusted users) -- not fewer.
• Admins are supposed to be ordinary users who have can be trusted to use some of the more destructive functions of the wiki. Inactivity does not make them less trustworthy. They are trustworthy whether the current community knows them to be trustworthy or not.
• Keeping every admin even after they are inactive gives the impression that adminship is something so ordinary that we don't care whether it is removed or not.

Activity of Administrators

1. Any administrator who has knowingly made a contribution to Wikipedia five months or less prior to the current date shall be known as active.
2. Any administrator whose last contribution has been made more than five months prior to the current date without previously relating their knowledge that they would not be contributing during this period shall be known as inactive.
3. Any administrator who knows in advance that they will be unable to contribute for a period of five months or more may state this; in so doing this the administrator shall be known as away.

Actions Taken with Respect to Inactivity Relating to Administrators

1. Any administrator found to be inactive shall be contacted. If no response is received, two more reminders shall be sent out, four and six weeks from the initial reminders. If the administrator does not respond within eight weeks of the initial reminder or is otherwise demonstrably unable or unwilling to respond, their sysop access shall be temporarily removed. If the sysop does not return within two months from this date, their access shall be considered to be permanently removed.
2. Any administrators declaring themselves to be away shall temporarily have their sysop access removed.

Reinstatement of Sysop Access

1. An administrator who has their sysop access removed due to previously being inactive should, if they wish to regain their sysop access, file an application as though they had never been a sysop (i.e. via RFA) if and only if they have been declared inactive more than one month previous.
2. An administrator who has their sysop access removed due to previously being away, or who has been inactive and has been desysopped for less than one month, should, if they wish to regain their sysop status, inform a bureaucrat, after which their sysop access will be reinstated.